Practise Losing Poem by gershon hepner

PRACTISE LOSING


Practice losing so you don’t discover
that you’re a loser: find your wife a lover,
and compensate for your deficiencies
by giving other men a chance to please
her in a way that that you no longer can.
Although of course you will not be the man
to whom she turns when she needs sexual service
her cheating will no longer make you nervous
because as her composer and conductor
she’ll be more happy than if you had fucked her,
so satisfied with men that you’ve been choosing
she won’t complain about the skills you’re losing,
not just a cuckold, but her benefactor,
though no her leading actor her redactor.
Tom Barbash reviews Howard Jacobson’s novel “The Act of Love” in the NYT Book Review, May 17,20009 (“Sexual Insult”) :

“Only the sick are healthy, ” says Felix Quinn, the subversively romantic narrator of Howard Jacobson’s twisted and acrobatically impressive new novel, “The Act of Love.” Felix is a rare breed of protagonist, a willful and discerning cuckold. Far from fearing his wife’s infidelity, he arranges its continued occurrence and even selects her lover. He wants his wife, Marisa, to sleep not just with someone else but with a legitimate Lothario, “a man who would cross any boundary if there was gloomy mischief in it.” After much searching, he manages to find such a person — a handsome layabout named Marius, encountered at a funeral. Jacobson’s previous novel, “Kalooki Nights, ” was told in the voice of a Jewish cartoonist attempting to untangle a friend’s Holocaust-inspired crime. In “The Act of Love, ” Jacobson explores sexual obsession and secret manipulation. The owner of an antiquarian bookstore, a connoisseur of art and music, Felix proclaims that his specialty is “sexual insult, ” which he seeks and finds everywhere, eventually subjecting Marisa to multiple viewings of plays about betrayal. Of particular interest is “Othello, ” whose title character, in Felix’s view, longs for Desdemona to “be enjoyed” by others…Jacobson goes to great comedic lengths to detail Felix’s love for his wife, including soaring tributes to her breasts and dancing style and general beauty, from which he “had to look away. It was either that or go blind.” The book is also stocked with aphorisms about marriage and attraction, deviancy and love. For Felix, jealousy and love are so closely intertwined he can’t tell them apart. Above all, he fears the loss of jealousy; he’s as protective of it as a doting father might be of a favorite child. Since Jacobson’s protagonist is a man who lives inside his head, “The Act of Love” is both gorgeously and monstrously internal. To read it is to take a trip with someone so lucidly demented that you lose your bearings. Which isn’t to say he’s wrong about his own motivations. The more you love a woman, Felix insists, the more you fear her loss. And so, he asks, “is it not a sensible strategy — of the imagination and the heart — to practice losing her? ”


5/17/09